Things may have been rather quiet over at iriver for the past few months, but it is clear that the company has no plans to let itself fade to nothingness while its competitors continue to churn out portable music players. Will its new U100 portable media player be a sign of the Korean OEM making its comeback to the competition?

With Apple’s iPods and Microsoft’s Zunes wrapping up most of the portable media player market, it would seem that the die has been cast for most manufacturers of competing products, right? Well, apparently not, especially if iriver has got anything to say about it. After having had nothing more but lukewarm responses from the market over the previous devices, it seems that the Korean consumer electronics manufacturer is making a comeback with a new portable media player which it calls the U100.

The first thing that might come to mind upon viewing the U100 is that iriver’s engineers have seemingly taken a page out of Microsoft’s book when working on the portable media player’s design. In fact, we’d go out on a limb and say that the U100 looks rather similar to Microsoft’s current line of Zune HD portable media players in terms of hardware design and user interface.

That being said, the U100 also sports various features which differentiates it from most portable media players in the market today. According to iriver, the U100 is capable of providing up to 50 hours of music on a single battery charge, or 11 hours when used exclusively as a video playback device. In addition, the U100 sports a 3.1-inch TFT touchscreen which has a native resolution of 480 x 320 and 4-16GB of built-in storage which can be expanded via the use of microSHDC cards. Last but not least, the U100 also offers the ability to read ebooks in ePub and PDF formats

No other information such as pricing and release details has been announced for the iriver U100 portable media player yet, so whether it will ever make its way to our shores remains to be seen. But before we go, we’ll leave you with this short one-minute video about the U100 so that you can get a better idea of what to expect from it.